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In Jerusalem, a Museum's Treasures Go Unseen

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On most days it doesn't happen, but on this day a bottle tossed from a crowd on Sultan Suleiman Street smashed against the window of a car as it paused in traffic near the Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem. This has happened often enough to Tallay Ornan, curator of the Rockefeller Museum, that she shrugged off the attack as part of her job.

Up the street, behind a gate and perched on a hill overlooking the northeast corner of the wall surrounding the Muslim Quarter of the Old City here, the Rockefeller Museum sits like a fortress, the small number of visitors testifying to the precarious political situation in which this institution finds itself yet again.

Here at the Rockefeller are remains of eighth-century wooden beams from Al-Aqsa, the mosque on the Temple Mount; an elaborately carved lintel from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, dating from the time of the Crusaders, and jewels, mosaics and other artifacts from the Neolithic through the Byzantine periods, most discovered in the region during the 1920's and 30's. It is a spectacular collection.

But with attendance having plummeted more than 60 percent to about two dozen visitors a day since the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, began two and a half years ago, Mrs. Ornan has become the custodian of a museum without money for exhibitions. The Israel Museum in West Jerusalem, which administers the Rockefeller's exhibition activities, did away with its already tiny $20,000 budget last year, saying it was pointless to invest in displays that almost no one sees.

Still, the issue was never simply money or attendance. It has always been a question of perception and political will, for even before the intifada, the Rockefeller was an institution that troubled the Israeli officials who inherited it from the Jordanians after the war of 1967. Almost everything the Israelis have thought of doing poses a problem.

Even though few Arabs visit the museum, removing major Islamic and Christian artifacts from the Rockefeller to the Israel Museum could, for symbolic reasons, provoke the anger of the Arabs in East Jerusalem. It would also concede to what the administration of Mayor Teddy Kollek has adamantly resisted: that Jerusalem remains, in spirit if not in law, two cities.

''This is and this isn't a different town,'' Mrs. Ornan said, standing on the museum's steps. ''We in Jerusalem live in two separate realities.''

On the other hand, to pour energies into the Rockefeller and perhaps to move relevant objects to it from the archeological collections of the Israel Museum might be perceived by Arabs as a further act of Israeli colonization in East Jerusalem. For their part, many Jews in West Jerusalem, who will not venture to the Rockefeller, anyway, might view such efforts as a waste of resources and a dismantling of the Israel Museum's collection.

A Hostage to Events

So nothing at all is done, which has pretty much been the situation at the museum since it opened in 1938. Indeed, the story of the Rockefeller has been the history of an institution held hostage to one after another of the events that have shaped and reshaped the city in the last half-century. Nothing about the museum has been free from the battles between Arabs and Jews, between East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem.

The idea for the museum dates to the 1920's, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. Demonstrating what was at that time a forward-thinking attitude, the British proposed to create a repository in Jerusalem for antiquities discovered in local excavations rather than removing most major objects to England, as had been the custom of colonial archeologists for centuries.

The Palestine Archeological Museum, as it was named (and as it is still called in scholarly journals), would be housed on a 10-acre plot encompassing conservation laboratories, a library and offices for the recently established Department of Antiquities for Palestine.

By 1927, the British had found someone to finance the project. John D. Rockefeller 2d, having been discouraged from pursuing a plan to build an archeological museum in Cairo, agreed to donate $2 million toward the construction of the museum in Jerusalem.

The English architect Austin S. B. Harrison was hired and came up with a wonderful scheme that blended elements of local styles of architecture, including Islamic and Egyptian. Construction began in 1930, and was delayed early on when an excavation of the site revealed tombs dating from the fifth century B.C. Other delays followed.

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And it wasn't long after it finally opened that the Rockefeller, as it quickly came to be known, over Rockefeller's objections, found its progress delayed by World War II. The museum that opened in 1938 remained much the same in 1948, when the city of Jerusalem was divided between the Jordanians and the Israelis.

The Rockefeller was technically under the jurisdiction of an international committee of scholars during Jordanian rule in East Jerusalem, but on Nov. 1, 1966, King Hussein of Jordan finally succeeded in nationalizing the museum. Seven months later, the museum was taken by an Israeli paratroop brigade, and like all Jordanian possessions in the city it became Israeli property.

Since 1948, it had been off-limits to Jewish archeologists who had worked there under the British, and those who returned in 1967 found a place that had been largely unaltered in nearly two decades. One worker's notes were just where she had left them.

A Silent Place

It would be wrong to say that the Jordanians neglected the Rockefeller. They carefully conserved objects and made important contributions to the collection with the addition of several of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And as they do today, foreign scholars visited the library and borrowed the occasional object for an exhibition abroad.

But the museum has been mostly silent for years. Mrs. Ornan, who was appointed to the Rockefeller by the Israel Museum in 1984, has undertaken the first comprehensive survey of the objects in the collection. (''We didn't even know what was here,'' she said.) Despite what she described as a kind of indifference from the Israel Museum, before the intifada in 1987 she staged an exhibition of Crusader sculpture from various churches in the area. The exhibition, which was well received in international academic circles, was an attempt to bridge the gulf between the Christian and Jewish people of Jerusalem.

Yet the 39-year-old Jerusalem-born Mrs. Ornan, who says she remembers hearing stories as a child about the museum from her mother and who went to it for the first time shortly after the 1967 war, finds that she is the custodian of a place so enmeshed in political intricacies that even its name has become a matter of contention.

Officials at the Israel Museum would prefer that it be called simply the Archeological Museum, contending that references to Palestine or to the name of a wealthy American patron are, in the current situation, inflammatory.

A Colonialist Fantasy

Still, if nothing else, the longstanding paralysis that has plagued museum affairs can also be credited for maintaining the Rockefeller's extraordinary character. It is a throwback to the days before galleries around the world turned themselves over to marketing experts.

Built on the site from which Godfrey de Bouillon initiated his attack on the walls of the city in 1099, overlooking the Mount of Olives to the east and Mount Scopus to the north, it was designed by Harrison as a kind of colonialist fantasy of the ancient Middle East, an Art Deco homage to the past in pinkish-white Jerusalem limestone. No part of the museum seems more frozen in time than Harrison's sun-drenched central courtyard, the focal point of the museum with its sunken reflecting pool filled with lilies and goldfish and surrounded by lavender bushes.

In this most troubled section of the city, the Rockefeller remains a place of remarkable calm, presenting in wooden cases and haphazard displays, many of which have not changed in 50 years, some of the greatest archeological and artistic treasures from the Middle East.

Were it not for the bullet holes in the museum's library - mementos of the 1967 war - a visitor today could almost forget that the outside world had intruded on the Rockefeller.

Special to The New York Times

A version of this article appears in print on September 27, 1990, on Page C00013 of the National edition with the headline: In Jerusalem, a Museum's Treasures Go Unseen. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe